Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Quotes
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It is inconceivable how much wit it requires to avoid being ridiculous.
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Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.
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All that I've learned, I've forgotten. The little that I still know, I've guessed.
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All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions.
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Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth.
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The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
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Women bestow on friendship only what they borrow from love.
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Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.
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Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem.
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Running a house should be left to innkeepers.
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The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.
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There is as much expression in the feet as in the hands.
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We leave unmolested those who set the fire to the house, and prosecute those who sound the alarm.
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A good number of works owe their success to the mediocrity of their authors' ideas, which match the mediocrity of those of the general public.
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Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it; otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.
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It is passion that makes man live; wisdom makes one only last.
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Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.
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Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.
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Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. "It is," he says, "because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.
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In love, everything is true, everything is false; it is the one subject on which one cannot express an absurdity.
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In great matters, men behave as they are expected to; in little ones, as they would naturally
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The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society
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Do you think that revolutions are made with rose water?
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It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.